perhaps i should stop buying documentary tapes (discs), then. no matter how interested i am in the subject it seems just disappointment comes from watching them, look you see. well, ok (or all right) i only had a slight passing interest in the last one, being as it was the fate of the Scala cinema, but still. hopes were high for this one, but just no.
as for what this most recent documentary bought was, it was Lynch/Oz, which made quite clear how David Lynch had inserted references to The Wizard Of Oz (in its film incarnation) into all of his projects. such was fairly obvious in, say, Wild At Heart, which one could argue (despite the other source material) was clearly a remake of the whole thing. films such as Dune and The Elephant Man didn't, from memory, seem to lend themselves to such.
mostly, or for the most part, this is all just six or so filmmakers of various levels of fame and/or talent saying things like "yes, David Lynch is great and he liked Wizard Of Oz". the person who put it all together, whose name escapes me sorry, interjects now and then to point out that he likes David Lynch and so he must be brilliant. well, i like David Lynch and i am most decidedly ordinary and unimportant. but, celebrate yourself if no one else does, i guess.
it is kind of (more or less) left to the only really immediately recognisable director in this documentary, the celebrated John Waters, to make the one point this documentary has. he says something along the lines of yes, there's a lot of Wizard Of Oz references in Lynch's work, but isn't it ultimately so that every story told in every film is that of someone trying to get home. should you indulge a wide definition of what "getting home" may involve, he is of course correct.
let it not be said that all other comments were a waste of time, mind. i am surprised that it took watching this documentary for me to clock, or notice, that in Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me there's David Bowie in red shoes (slippers would be a bit much), shouting about how "we are not going to talk about Judy". oh.
one other thing i hadn't put together was that, more often than not, a David Lynch film will feature someone stood in front of curtains miming a song. a rather interesting nod, but from memory in none of the films is the "real" person in control behind the curtains in his films a la Wizard Of Oz. depending on how you define the scenes of that nature in Twin Peaks, mind. this snippet would be a perfect excuse to include a picture of Dean Stockwell doing that in Blue Velvet, but no, another Bowie image.
hopefully someone somewhere (over the rainbow, if need be) makes a much more better documentary about David Lynch. this one is not (entirely) without merit, for the clips selected from his films are rather good ones. overall, though, it's pretty sh!t. boring in places, which is criminal considering the excellent subject matter.
the provenance of my copy? picked up the video (fancy disc) at Fopp, i believe, for £8. maybe i would have been somewhat less disappointed had i paid just £6 for the standard DVD version instead. still, at least it was half the price of that Scala one, and it isn't signed by people i neither know nor care about.
be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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